8 - "La Merica" proved hard and generous

Italian immigrants flocked to San Francisco during and after the Gold Rush of 1849

In the spring of 1847, Andrea Gagliardo - a peasant from the countryside near Genoa - sailed on his first trip to the United States. He would eventually go back and forth 14 times, until 1888, when he finally returned to his hometown. His diary tells us how far was la Merica. Gagliardo wrote: "1847. On board the brig Bettuglia. Genoa to New York: 57 days". For two months, sky and sea, sky and sea.
We don't know how much Gagliardo paid for the crossing, but certainly no less than 300 lire (a fortune): that was the price for a Genoa-Buenos Aires cruise. Considering that the average ship could load 700 to 1,000 passengers, figuring out the profit for the shipping companies, which charged cargo at 290-300 lire per metric ton: the price of a ticket. Of course, no man weighs a ton.
The shipping companies weren't the only ones to profit from the human flood that crossed the ocean from the mid-19th century onwards. Up to 1901, when the Italian government passed a law regulating emigration, this was left in the hands of unprincipled private agents, "a new race of slavers, not unlike the old as to greed and lack of scruples," as they were called in an 1885 report from the Statistics Office of the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Trade.
They were connected to the shipping companies, and on their account they toured the bars and country fairs, wherever they could find people who would listen to them, and praised the comfortable crossing and the opportunities awaiting in America. They went beyond this, though: "They lie as in ambush, waiting for misery to grow in a given family," reads another report. "They know when the mortgage of farmer Tom is due or whether Dick the worker is indebted to a loan shark. Then they seduce, propose, insist, over and over, especially in the off season, until they manage to get one's assent to expatriate." They were paid a fee on every emigrant that boarded a ship.
Private individuals were not alone in this: mayors and parsons, town clerks and teachers, pharmacists and even some retired Carabinieri marshals: "All of them," underscores Amoreno Martellini, a scholar of emigration, "could spend the respectability deriving from their social role in order to supplement their income with the revenue of the fees on the emigrants."
The law passed in 1901 abolished agents and intermediaries, moralizing the emigration trade somewhat, but the damage had already been done. Especially because promises had often turned out to be empty: many of those who had fallen for the trap, mortgaging their wife's dowry or their homes to pay for the crossing, had been left ashore on Ellis Island to fend for themselves.
Those odysseys did not end with the passing of that law, however, because, after crossing the ocean, exhausted and dismayed, they fell prey to the padroni, wheeler-dealers who recruited fellow nationals and sent them to work constructing America, then entering the industrial age. They had connections with the big construction, mining and railway companies that asked them to supply labour. Under two conditions: the labourers had to accept their wages without hesitation and, most of all, not to be unionized. The padroni complied and profited both from the companies (which paid, quite handsomely, for this service) and from the labourers (who often had to give them their first paycheque).
Moreover, in addition to acting as an employment agency, they also acted as realtors (providing immigrants with homes to rent or buy) and banks (they lent money to their "customers" and cashed their paycheques and sent savings to Italy on their behalf).
Their turnover was high and profits were huge: the services of the padroni were never for free. They methods were swift: whoever raised their head starved.
Little Italies arose in order to recreate, thousands of kilometres from Italy, the environment of the towns left behind, but also to find real solidarity emancipating immigrants from the greed of the padroni. So Merica became more humane.
"Those people contributed to make the USA into a great country," says Severino Turchet, son of Friulian immigrants, and a real estate agent. "Today, after close to 150 years, many of their descendants are feathers in the cap for this country: people like former New York State governor Mario Cuomo, of Campanian origins, or his current successor, George Pataki, son of a Calabrian mother; Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and Time's Man of the Year; Nancy Pelosi, current number two of the House of Representatives; former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca; or IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano."
The list can go on at will: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Marisa Tomei and Liza Minnelli are just a few names in cinema; Madonna, Tony Bennett - whose real name is Antonio Di Benedetto, Bruce Springsteen - whose mother is Italian, and Frank Sinatra in music; Gay Talese and Mario Puzo in literature; and Nobel laureate Franco Modigliani in economics.
"These people do not belong to the United States alone," concludes Turchet, "but to 20th century civilization as a whole."
The hotel in the vicinity of Central Park is quiet at night. The guests take their keys from the reception desk and slip into the elevators. From the room windows, one can see endless balconies, interrupted only by skyscrapers defying darkness and clouds. Over there, towards Manhattan's southern tip, once upon a time two identical towers stood: months, years, or centuries ago? It doesn't matter. Then darkness came. Their tragedy returns on the TV screen in one of the countless programs broadcast for not forgetting. Tonight, however, no more memories: one needs to put down the weight that has lied heavy ever since, in the early morning, this search for the places and moments of Italian immigration to the States began.
The remote helps to cancel the present. And suddenly, the TV set shows Nannarella, Anna Magnani. She's in a truck cabin with a young Burt Lancaster. The Rose Tattoo, the movie for which she won an Oscar, is easily identified. The Fifties.
In that decade, Italian actors also came to the USA, but with a return ticket. Among them, Nannarella and then Valentina Cortese, Sophia Loren, Vittorio Gassman, Claudia Cardinale, Virna Lisi, Rossano Brazzi, Gina Lollobrigida and Alida Valli. They contributed to the greatness of Realism of Italian cinema; they wanted to learn Hollywood-style filmmaking. They learned and taught at the same time. Since then, American acting became more authentic - and Italian less theatrical.
Nowadays, donna Sophia - as she's also known here - is a symbol. No need to explain who she is. But whose is she? "No doubt," the concierge tells me, whose grandparents came from Benevento, "donna Sophia belongs to America now." Let him think so: doesn't she belong to all those who rediscover lost emotions in her films?
The music caressing the walls and armchairs in the hall is New York, New York. The unmistakable voice is the Italian-American Frank Sinatra declaring his love for the city that, to whole generations, embodied la Merica.

Publication Date: 2002-09-15
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1756